


Take It Off

by thesupernaturalravenclaw



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-27 01:06:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18187829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesupernaturalravenclaw/pseuds/thesupernaturalravenclaw
Summary: Sirius is just trying to get his homework done, but it's a virtual impossibility with Remus around all the time looking like that...





	Take It Off

Sirius hates Remus's clothes.  
Always has, ever since they were eleven years old and first making their way to Hogwarts. His shirts are baggy and dull, in washed-out shades that help him to fade into the background. His trousers are always patched in a dozen places, a constant reminder of the hardship and poverty he and his family have experienced. Seeing these patches is always hard for Sirius - he wants to use some of his family's endless money for good (for a change) and help Remus to buy new clothes, but he knows his friend would never allow it. Remus doesn't accept charity and doesn't like to be pitied.  
So Sirius finds creative solutions. He buys shirts a size too small to wear himself (Remus has always been skinny) and passes them off as unwanted Christmas gifts from distant relatives. He trawls his wardrobe for old things that no longer fit him. Sometimes he even resorts to ruining Remus's clothes with 'wayward' spells and buying much nicer replacements in apology.  
He's been doing this successfully for years, but recently he's begun to realise the unintended side effect of his plan. His gradual overhauling of Remus's wardrobe has served only to emphasise his friend's good looks, and made it far more difficult for Sirius to resist the urge to kiss him.  
Sirius knows it's somewhat irrational to blame his feelings on Remus's outfits, but he can't help it. He now hates Remus's clothes (many of which he himself provided) because they are too nice. Really, he muses as they're sprawled in the common room one evening, people as attractive as Remus should be forced to wear sacks to prevent them from distracting others. Particularly this year, with their OWLs approaching, because how in Merlin's name is Sirius supposed to focus on his Transfiguration homework with Remus looking like that?  
When it comes to Remus's clothes, Sirius is often faced with a dilemma. Would he rather Remus were indeed wearing a sack, so as perhaps to diminish his frankly extraordinary beauty and allow Sirius to focus on his schoolwork - or would he prefer him to be wearing nothing at all? His response to this pressing problem varies greatly depending on how studious he's feeling. Normally, that isn't very studious at all, so his thoughts tend towards the latter option more often than is ideal (in terms of his homework, that is - Sirius sees no other downside to imagining Remus naked). However, Sirius's complete inability to focus on his studies whenever Remus is around has begun to take its toll on his grades, so he's started to work alone in the library in the evenings (much to his friends' amazement).  
Tonight, though, he decides that the essay on Vanishing Spells can wait, and stows the parchment away in his bag. This causes James to fake a dramatic gasp of astonishment. "Sirius Orion Black -" (Sirius wishes he'd never shared his awful middle name with his friends) "- surely you aren't planning to leave that homework until tomorrow? What on earth will the other swots think? They'll throw you out of the club!"  
Sirius throws a cushion at him. "It's only Transfiguration, James Fleamont Potter,” - James groans and Sirius smirks - “and besides, I can't work with you tossers distracting me anyway."  
"We've been distracting you for five years and never once driven you to work in the library," Remus says slowly, looking at him suspiciously. "Why is it a problem all of a sudden?"  
Sirius fidgets, unable to meet Remus's (mesmerising) eyes. "Well, you know," he hedges, "it's OWL year, and we need to work hard to-"  
James chokes on his Butterbeer. "Work hard?" he splutters in disbelief. "When have you ever once in your life worked hard at school?"  
Peter gasps, his eyes darting frantically between Sirius and James. "There's a girl!" he squeals in excitement. "He's sneaking off with some girl whenever he says he's working! That must be it!"  
Sirius laughs at Peter's 'realisation' (since nothing could be further than the truth). “Why would I be sneaking off with some girl, Peter, when I’ve been lusting after you for all these years?” he asks, fluttering his long black eyelashes at the horrified boy. Sirius continues dramatically, kneeling on the floor in front of Peter’s armchair. “Alas, though I have tried to contain my passion it burns like dragonfire for you and bursts forth-“  
“Sit down, you idiot, Peter’s about to throw up and you do not want to stay that close.” James grabs his shoulder and pulls him away. Sirius flops back down on the sofa next to Remus and scowls, although he does note that Peter’s face has gone very pale - James might have been onto something there.  
“Serves you right if you throw up Peter, that’ll teach you not to be a homophobic idiot,” James drawls, lying back on the sofa and throwing his legs over Sirius’ and Remus’ laps. Sirius grunts as James’ massive feet hit him in the stomach (seriously, those things are like boats, what on earth has Prongs been eating?).  
“I’m not homophobic!” Peter protests. “I’m fine with people doing - you know - whatever - I’m just not - I mean-“  
“Oh, for Merlin’s sake, Pete, it was a joke, you’ll give yourself an aneurysm if you carry on trying to finish that sentence. And I am not dragging you to the hospital wing again, I had enough of that last week when you tripped over your own feet and fell down two flights of stairs.” James rolls his eyes and stretches, accidentally kicking Sirius in the stomach again.  
“If you’ll recall,” Remus pipes up, “Peter actually tripped over your feet, James, because you were too busy staring at a certain red-haired Gryffindor prefect to realise that you were blocking the way-“ Sirius snorts at the memory of James’ dopey, lovesick expression, “-and that’s why you were the one who had to take him to the hospital wing. So actually that incident was entirely your fault.”  
“Not true!” James protests, struggling to sit up and kicking Sirius in the chest. “Pete should’ve at least looked where he was-“ He breaks off, staring across the common room. Sirius groans - he knows only too well what that face means.  
“You realise you have no chance with Evans, right mate?” Sirius asks, smirking. “She’s hated your guts ever since you hexed Snivellus our first week here.”  
“She loves me really,” James says distractedly, still gazing across the room at Lily. The others exchange glances - they’ve been through this so many times that they know exactly what James will do next. Sure enough, he leaps to his feet and starts making his way over to Lily and her friends, Peter following close behind.  
Sirius suddenly becomes very aware that without James taking up half the sofa, he and Remus are sitting very close together for no good reason, their sides pressed against each other. Remus seems to notice too and shifts slightly away, turning to face him with one eyebrow raised (incidentally, a very good look for him). “I noticed you did a very good job there of changing the subject from whoever you’ve been sneaking around with.”  
Sirius fidgets (he can’t help it, Remus’ gaze just has that effect on him - and the single raised eyebrow certainly isn’t helping matters). “I’m not sneaking around with anyone, I promise. I really do just go to the library to work.”  
Remus looks doubtful, but nods anyway. He hesitates, then starts, “Sirius - what you said to Peter just then-“  
“Moony, do you really think I’d be interested in Peter?” Sirius scoffs and avoids his friend’s eyes, hoping this question isn’t going where he thinks it is. However, that only draws his attention back to how nicely the green T-shirt he gave Moony for Christmas hugs his torso. Sirius forces his thoughts back to his Transfiguration essay to stop himself getting too carried away.   
Remus flushes. “Of course not, I just wondered if you were - I mean-“  
“Spit it out, Moony, or you’ll end up like Peter, stumbling through every other sentence. That would be a waste of your unrivalled eloquence and wit.” Sirius says lightly, hoping to draw Remus into a different conversation than the one he suspects they are now having.   
This fails miserably when Remus mutters, “I was wondering if you were gay.”  
“Why, do you like what you see?” Sirius retorts automatically - snark is his standard defence mechanism whenever he feels vulnerable. He tries to keep his expression neutral to hide his fervent hope that Remus does, indeed, like what he sees.  
Remus blushes darker and looks down at his feet. “I just meant - you can tell us, if you are. We’re your friends no matter what, even if Peter is a bit weird about it.” He tips his head back and looks Sirius in the eyes.  
Sirius hesitates. He planned to deny everything if this ever came up, but somehow he can’t bring himself to lie to Remus (especially with those beautiful eyes staring at him). He settles for a simple, “Thanks, Moony. And I’m always here to listen to you, too, if you need me.” He says it lightly, but he means every word - in fact, he would gladly spend his every waking moment listening to Remus talk.  
Remus looks at him steadily, as if he’s thinking hard about something, and then says, so quietly Sirius thinks at first that he’s imagining it, “I think - I think I might be gay.”  
Sirius looks back at his friend in shock, trying desperately to keep a calm expression on his face even though his heart feels like it’s doing backflips. “Re-really?” he croaks, inwardly cursing his voice for betraying him. “Er- what makes you think that? I mean- what made you realise?” His attempt to act calm and collected about this revelation is clearly not working.  
“I, er-“ Remus looks over his shoulder at the rest of the common room and shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about this here,” he mutters. “Can we go up to the dorm?” Sirius is on his feet practically before the question has left his mouth and bounds off for the staircase - he needs to know more about this as soon as is humanly possible. He ignores Peter’s call to “come and see what a prat James is making of himself now” and virtually drags Moony up the stairs and into their room. Sirius throws himself down on his bed and turns to look expectantly at Remus, who sighs and sinks down next to him (Sirius’ heart leaps again but he tells himself there’s nothing strange about this development, the Marauders sit on and even sleep in each other’s beds all the time, the concept of personal boundaries was abandoned long ago, sometime during their first week at Hogwarts).  
Remus exhales slowly and looks down at the floor, fiddling nervously with the hem of his T-shirt (which Sirius finds very distracting). “I don’t know exactly when I started to realise,” he says carefully, “but looking back I think I’ve always been more attracted to boys than girls - I like girls as friends but I’ve never wanted to have anything more with them.”  
Sirius nods slowly. Truthfully, he’s always felt like that - whenever James goes off on one of his tangents about Lily and her infinite perfection, Sirius always wonders where the appeal lies with girls. Lily is pretty, of course she is, and so are Marlene and Mary and Dorcas and Alice and all the other girls James tried to flirt with before realising that Lily was the only one for him, but they aren’t attractive to Sirius the way that a certain lanky werewolf is. He isn’t falling behind on his homework because he’s been daydreaming about girls, after all, but because of the endless images in his head of Remus in various states of undress-  
“Sirius? Hello? Sirius?” He realises that Remus has been waving a hand in front of his face and hastily forces his mind back to their conversation.  
“So, er, is there anyone in particular you’re interested in then, Moony? Anyone you’re just dying to settle down with and raise cubs?”  
Remus’ expression darkens and he says quietly, “It doesn’t matter, really, does it? No one will ever want to be with someone like me, not seriously. Not when I could hurt them.”  
Sirius feels something twist painfully in his chest. “Of course someone will want to be with you!” he says indignantly (me for one, he thinks). “You’re funny, kind, interesting and clever - anyone would be lucky to have you, Moony.”  
There is a sudden silence in the room and he can hear muffled shouts from downstairs - probably Lily getting fed up with James’ endless flirting and hexing him for the third time that week. Sirius idly wonders whether she’s used the Furnunculus Curse or the Jelly-Legs Jinx this time, but he can feel Remus’ eyes on him and soon stops caring.  
“You- you mean that?” Remus asks quietly, tentatively.  
Sirius stares at him. True, he hasn’t yet mustered the courage to tell Remus about his more - well, intimate - feelings for him, but he’s sure it must be obvious to everyone with eyes how highly he thinks of Remus! “Of course,” he says finally, still staring at Remus in confusion. “Why on earth wouldn’t I mean it, Moony? Did you think I was just pretending to be your friend for the last five years?”  
Remus blushes again (which Sirius finds very distracting, it’s really quite inconsiderate of Remus to be diverting his attention like this when they’re trying to have an important conversation). “Well, when you put it like that it sounds stupid,” he mumbles, “but you must admit you haven’t been around much lately. I thought maybe you were, well, getting sick of us. Or at least of me.”  
Sirius just stares at him. He’s aware that he must look like a complete idiot, but he just can’t find the words to explain how impossible it is that he would ever get sick of his friends. And especially Remus. The thought of living without them is what makes him sick, and that’s why he hasn’t said a single word about how he has begun to feel about Remus, because the possibility of losing his friends - no, his family - makes it a risk not worth taking.  
Suddenly he feels a hand on his shoulder and realises that, once again, he has been staring at Remus’ perfect face for far too long (in his defence, it is very distracting). However, he still can’t think of anything to say - at least, anything that doesn’t make him come across as a complete idiot, and that’s not really the image he wants to give off around Remus.  
Remus laughs quietly. “It’s okay, Sirius,” he says, clearly mistaking his friend’s silence for agreement. “I guess I always knew you’d rise above me in the end.” He looks down at his hands, and the expression on his face breaks Sirius’ heart.  
“Are you joking, Moony?” Sirius finally manages to spit out. “You must be...you can’t honestly think that I’d ever want to stop being your friend! A world where we aren’t friends isn’t one worth living in, to be honest.”  
Remus’s face lights up. “So...you really aren’t sneaking off because you’re bored of us?”  
“No, of course not!” Sirius almost shouts. “Did you not hear everything I just said about how great you are?”  
“Well, then...what are you doing?”  
“I’m studying, like I told you already!”  
Remus looks sceptical. “But you’re Sirius Black! You do all of your essays the night - or even the morning - before they’re due and you write them lying on the sofa with your feet on the table and you still get great marks! You’ve spent nearly five years doing it that way, always with James joking around and throwing things and generally being distracting, and you’ve never had any trouble. I understand if you don’t want to tell me what you’re up to but please don’t lie to me, Sirius!”  
The look on Remus’s face is crushing. Sirius hates that his friend could ever believe that Sirius would ever get bored of him, that he would prioritise a fling with some stranger over his best friends - but most of all he hates that look of resignation, the one that shows how little Remus has learned to expect from the world. Remus deserves everything, and it breaks Sirius’s heart not to be able to show him that.  
But he can at least try.  
“I,” he begins, swallowing hard, “I would never lie to you, Moony. Not ever.”  
Remus looks frustrated. “Then tell me why you keep sneaking off!”  
“Because I can’t concentrate when I’m around you!” Sirius almost shouts. “Because there’s no way I can think about Astronomy charts and Potions recipes and the bloody goblin wars of 1281 when you’re sitting in front of me looking like that and all I want to do is kiss you! Because if I don’t get my homework done somehow I’ll be thrown out of Hogwarts and I won’t be around you anymore! Because-“  
Sirius never gets to finish that sentence, because suddenly, miraculously, Remus is kissing him, and his hands are sliding up Sirius’s back, and now his legs are straddling Sirius’s hips, and oh, Merlin, Sirius might actually be dead, he might have died and gone to heaven because this is too perfect and there’s no way it’s actually happening, but it definitely feels real, and now Sirius’s hands are threading through Remus’s hair and pulling him closer, never wanting it to end.  
But eventually, it does end.  
They break apart, staring at each other, and Sirius is, once again, speechless. Remus bites his lip (which really does not help Sirius’s brain to start working again) and looks away, blushing. “I know that probably wasn’t very good, I’m sorry, I’ve never kissed anyone bef-“  
And this time it’s Remus who doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because Sirius is kissing him, and this time it’s definitely not allowed to end.  
Until the door of the dormitory bangs open and a very dishevelled and red-faced James Potter limps in, missing his left shoe and covered in red hex marks. His glasses are also nowhere to be seen, which, combined with that trademark Potter obliviousness (honestly, Sirius doesn’t know how on earth James’s dad’s business got so successful when it took him three days last summer to notice that Sirius was staying in their house) means that he somehow manages not to notice that Remus is on top of Sirius and they’re looking pretty dishevelled themselves. James glances vaguely in their direction, mutters, “night” and flops onto his bed, presumably to mope about Lily rejecting him again.  
Wordlessly, Remus draws the curtains around Sirius’ bed, then murmurs, “Muffliato.”  
“Now,” he says, with a rare mischievous grin, “where were we?”  
Sirius smirks - somehow, his powers of reasoning and speech have returned - and pulls Remus down on top of him. “I hate that shirt,” he murmurs, fisting his hands in Remus’s hair.  
Remus looks (adorably) confused, and slightly offended. “You gave it to me, remember?”  
“Doesn’t matter,” Sirius mumbles in between kisses. “I hate it.”  
“Well then,” Remus smirks down at him, “what do you want me to do about it?”  
“Take it off.”


End file.
